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Federica Sallusto

http://usi.to/sf3

Biography

Federica Sallusto received the degree of Doctor in Biology from the University of Rome in 1988, and performed postdoctoral work at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome and at the Basel Institute for Immunology, where she was a member from 1997 to 2000. Since 2000 she is Group leader of the Cellular Immunology Laboratory at the IRB where she has also established the Center of Medical Immunology. Since 2017, she is Full Professor in Medical Immunology at the ETH Zurich and at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano (joint professorship). Among her original contributions are the development of a method to culture human dendritic cells, the discovery that human Th1, Th2 and Th17 cells express distinct sets of chemokine receptors, the definition of central and effector memory T cell subsets, of skin-homing Th22 cells and of two distinct types of Th17 cells. In the mouse system, her work has shown that NK cells, T helper cells, and cytotoxic T cells can migrate to inflamed lymph nodes, where they profoundly modulate T cell responses, and that encephalitogenic Th17 cells use CCR6 to enter the CNS through the choroid plexus. For her scientific achievements, she received the Pharmacia Allergy Research Foundation Award in 1999, the Behring Lecture Prize in 2009, and the Science Award from the Foundation for Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases in 2010. She was elected member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina in 2009 and of EMBO in 2011. From March 2013 to March 2015 she was president of the Swiss Society for Allergology and Immunology and is currently President elect of the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS). In 2018, she became member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).